The Pavlovs were summering at Sillamiagi when Nicholas II stepped onto the balcony of the Winter Palace on July 20, 1914, to address several hundred thousand of his subjects who had gathered in Palace Square to hear his response to the German declaration of war. In the very spot where a deadly fusillade from the tsar’s army had sparked the 1905 revolution—and where, not six months earlier, a quarter million workers had angrily demonstrated to mark the ninth anniversary of that Bloody Sunday—the crowd now knelt as one and sang “God Save the Tsar.” A rousing cheer greeted his pledge “not to make peace as long as a single enemy remains on Russia’s soil.”1
A wave of patriotic fervor seemed to wash away social and political divisions. With the exception of Bolshevik deputies and a few other leftists, the Duma enthusiastically financed and embraced the war. Vladimir Purishkevich, leader of the extreme rightists, and his nemesis, Pavel Miliukov of the left-liberal Kadets, literally embraced in a show of national unity. The greater part of the intelligentsia joined the church in blessing the young men who enlisted hurriedly lest they miss the action in what most agreed would prove a very short adventure. Many citizens took to the streets, sacking German shops and destroying the German embassy on St. Isaac’s Square as policemen, the mayor, and the minister of internal affairs looked on. Having left St. Petersburg in early June, the Pavlovs returned to Petrograd at summer’s end, the city having acquired a new, etymologically Russian name in the wave of national feeling.2
Pavlov’s patriotism, too, was much aroused. He devoted his first lecture of the 1914–1915 academic year to an enthusiastic endorsement of Russia’s war aims, and assured his coworkers that “if not for my age, I would abandon everything and volunteer for the army.”3 With his sons Vladimir and Vsevolod at the front, he followed the war news avidly. “Every Russian defeat or victory touched him to the depths of his soul,” recalled Jasper Ten-Kate, a member of Pavlov’s much-diminished lab group during the war years. “So great was his interest in the front that his coworkers competed to provide him with sensational news acquired through personal contacts.” Pavlov rewarded them with passionate reactions, “cursing the Germans or the Russians depending on the circumstances.”4 Declining an invitation to speak at Moscow’s private Shaniavskii University in September 1914, he explained: “Now my mood is so unstable since everything is overshadowed by the war that scientific interests and scientific thinking barely remain.”5 Two months later, he mused to physiologist Alexander Samoilov: “There is the result of all those international contacts for you. How and when will we again meet with our scientific comrades? What a mystery of human life, of human culture! This occupies me now rather more than conditional reflexes.”6 In April 1915, he still felt too preoccupied with the war to deliver a public lecture about science: “God grant that the terrible cloud hanging over the world will pass and that we will be able to return to our usual peaceful activities. But now I do not have and cannot summon the necessary inspiration for either work or presentations.”7
He peppered his lectures with comments about the war, pouncing on one student whose late arrival to class reminded him of the cursed Russian trait that had exacted such a price at the Battle of Tannenberg: “Sir, you have now acted like General Rennenkampf, who arrived late to relieve General Samsonov, whose army, due to this tardiness, was captured. Sit down and don’t repeat this.” This precipitated a ten-minute peroration on national types: “The Slavs, particularly the Russians, should learn from the Germans about punctuality and precision.... If one could add German precision to the Russian’s boldness and cleverness, then we would far outpace all nations and states.”8
The war news was rarely encouraging. Russia fielded the largest army—some twelve million men—and its soldiers fought bravely and determinedly, but they suffered from incompetent and sometimes corrupt leadership, poor logistical support, and a comparatively weak industrial base that, as the conflict wore on, could not replenish the army’s material losses in the field. Ruinous defeats in the first months of the war cost Russia all of Poland and much of western Russia and its Baltic provinces. The army’s performance improved in 1916, when General Brusilov’s counteroffensive shattered Austrian positions along the Galician border. But the attack fared poorly against German reinforcements and by year’s end had bogged down far short of its goals, at a staggering cost in lives and equipment. The Russian army entered the winter of 1916 plagued by chronic shortages of manpower, arms, and ammunition; a demoralized officer corps; and disintegrating discipline in the ranks.
By this time, enthusiasm and unity on the home front had long since disappeared, replaced by food lines, despair, finger-pointing, and accusations of treason. Secret police reports warned that inflation and material privation were stoking dangerous sentiments among workers and peasants. During the first two years of war, the cost of boots and coal had quadrupled, and the price of a cheap meal in a workers’ café had increased sevenfold. In early 1917, the price of food staples—bread, cabbage, milk, and meat—began to increase 2 to 7 percent each week. “Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word,” one police agent warned. “A revolution, if it takes place, will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.” Conditions were especially dire in Petrograd, which depended upon food imports from distant regions along railways now clogged with military supplies.9
The fragility of Nicholas II’s bond with his people was now fully exposed. Many pointed fingers accusingly at the Winter Palace—at the tsar’s ineffectual leadership of both the nation and his own family, and at the treachery, corruption, and degeneracy that was popularly associated with the Tsaritsa Alexandra and her “dear friend,” the itinerant monk Grigorii Rasputin. The German-born Alexandra was certainly innocent of charges of disloyalty, but her boundless faith in the crude and flamboyantly debauched Rasputin—who alone seemed capable of halting the terrible bleeding of the hemophiliac heir Aleksei—had by 1916 given him great influence over the running of the state and the war. Popular broadsheets portrayed Rasputin as the evil master of a degenerate court, Alexandra as a faithless wife and traitor, and Nicholas II as an incompetent cuckold. Many in the highest circles of society and state were also convinced that the empress’s alliance with Rasputin was leading Russia toward disaster. In December 1916, a group of plotters—led by the rightist leader Purishkevich, Grand Duke Dmitrii Pavlovich, and Prince Felix Yusupov—murdered the profligate priest in a phantasmagorically prolonged bout of poisoning, shooting, and drowning.
Shortly thereafter, on a clear winter day, a gloomy Pavlov strolled with his collaborator Iurii Frolov past the Winter Palace. The newspapers were full of lurid details about the killing of Rasputin and rumors of intrigues and treachery. As they passed the tsar’s residence, Pavlov spoke rapidly and emotionally: “They lost the war...The tsar lost the war...What now will become of Russia?”10
Pavlov resumed his working routine by the fall of 1915, although most of his coworkers had been called to the front, and those who remained were usually available only for short periods of time. During the war years, research concentrated on the dynamics of inhibition and differentiation, the relationship of inhibition to sleep, and the stages by which CRs developed.11 The lab’s few new arrivals were mostly coworkers of the new type. Jasper Ten-Kate, Max Gubergrits, and Leonid Voskresenskii were all aspiring physiologists who would pursue successful scientific careers in the postwar years. Voskresenskii, like Pavlov the son of a priest, enjoyed the distinction of working simultaneously in both Pavlov’s and Bekhterev’s labs. In 1915, he was researching the physiology of sleep; he would later become one of the first researchers to study CRs in higher primates.
Ten-Kate had been born in St. Petersburg, but as the son of a Dutch citizen was exempt from military service. Entering the lab in 1914, he was impressed by the “almost pedantic regularity” of Pavlov’s schedule, and found the chief’s daily visit to the bench a “colossal stimulus to work. He entered into all details and rejoiced in every successful experiment; if the experiments did not succeed, this had a positively depressing effect upon him.” The chief’s relationship to coworkers made them “feel at home” in the lab, Ten-Kate observed, but there was also a substantial disadvantage to his managerial style: “All work, with rare exceptions, was conducted according to Ivan Petrovich’s ideas. And one must say sincerely that I. P. did not like it if one of his coworkers expressed his own ideas, toward which, as a rule, he related skeptically. Without even noticing it, his coworkers unquestioningly obeyed his will.” Ten-Kate initially feared expressing his opinion, having witnessed Pavlov’s sometimes intemperate response. Over time, however, “having studied his character closely,” he did so and found to his delight that the chief often agreed with him. Not all coworkers, however, had such perspicacity and courage, and the “system of unquestioning subordination of the coworkers to Ivan Petrovich’s will” had the great defect of suppressing their initiative. Yet that same system, Ten-Kate concluded, also allowed Pavlov to instill in them “such love for science, such enthusiasm, as if part of him had itself entered his students.”12
A second steady coworker during the war years was Max Gubergrits, a physician from the Kiev University clinic of Professor V. P. Obraztsov, who in 1915 dispatched Gubergrits to Petrograd, as he had three young physicians before him, to learn some physiology and write his doctoral thesis in Pavlov’s lab. In his initial interview with Pavlov, Gubergrits found the chief’s appearance striking and his manner impressive. He had “entirely gray hair with a youthful face, the enormous forehead of a thinker, and lively, brilliant eyes.” Brushing aside the new arrival’s desire to work on digestion, Pavlov insisted that he join the research on CRs and launched into a short course on it: “His manner of speaking was lively and picturesque, accompanied by lively gesticulations and expressive mimicry...It seemed that not his mouth...but his entire person was speaking—his face, eyes, hands, and all this lively mimicry and clear picturesque speech enabled a person who understood nothing of conditional reflexes (and I was such) immediately to understand and join research in this intriguing field. For half an hour Ivan Petrovich explained to me the main stages through which he and his coworkers had passed in this sphere.”13 Pavlov then took him on a tour of his labs, introducing him to coworkers and assistants.
The chief also indulged himself in a playful physical assessment of his new associate. Like other favored coworkers, Gubergrits attended Pavlov’s lectures at the Military-Medical Academy and afterward walked with him to the IEM. “After the first lecture I returned with Ivan Petrovich alone. Suddenly, I noticed that Pavlov was steadily increasing his gait and glancing at me from time to time. We paced several kilometers at this energetic quick tempo. At the end of our path, Ivan Petrovich nodded approvingly: ‘Yes, you keep up a good pace.’” Afterward, the new arrival learned that Pavlov subjected all new coworkers to this test—and that those who failed became the butt of constant jokes. Gubergrits was twenty-eight at the time, Pavlov sixty-five.14
Gubergrits found Pavlov’s overpowering presence in the lab thoroughly positive: “Ivan Petrovich was never a neutral observer of an experiment. Every hour, every day he brought something new, explained that which had not been understood, and led experiments in the direction that would uncover new information.” This enthusiastic assessment reflected the chief’s timely intervention during two crucial junctures in Gubergrits’s research.15
Pavlov assigned Gubergrits to develop a new method for differentiation experiments. After ten months of diligent work, the coworker discovered to his horror one morning that all the CRs in his dog Kal’m had vanished. “The dog was extraordinarily agitated, saliva flowed steadily from its mouth—in a word, my entire ten months of work had been reduced to naught in the course of one night.” Panic-stricken, he turned to Pavlov, who, much intrigued, began observing Kal’m closely. Sidelined and nervous about completing his thesis, Gubergrits considered requesting another experimental animal, but refrained since he knew that Pavlov responded badly to coworkers who “tried to rid themselves of ‘incapable dogs.’” Finally, Pavlov solved the problem: he noticed one morning, when the attendant brought in the dogs—leashed together in a group for convenience—that Kal’m was tied up next to a bitch in heat. “This had brought Kal’m into a state of strong excitation, which had inhibited all reflexes and differentiations. Ivan Petrovich explained this as the strong action of an unconditional sexual reflex upon the conditional connections. And, indeed, after Kal’m was kept away from this bitch, all reflexes and differentiations were quickly restored.”16
Gubergrits’s struggles with a second troublesome animal turned the chief’s attention to the importance of inborn reflexes and led to the formulation of an enduring feature of Pavlovian doctrine—the notion of a “reflex of freedom.” In 1916, Pavlov assigned him a dog, Refleks, that, Gubergrits later learned, several coworkers had earlier abandoned because of its idiosyncratic behavior. “Outside of the experimental setting this dog seemed an entirely healthy animal, but when placed on the stand it would become agitated and moved about constantly, with saliva flowing unceasingly from the salivary fistula.” Previous coworkers had failed to develop any CRs or differentiations in the restless animal, and for two months Gubergrits’s efforts failed as well. He again consulted the chief, who began to sit in on his experiments. After making various modifications in experimental design without success, Pavlov suggested unfastening Refleks and conducting experiments when the dog was not on the stand. Refleks “calmed down completely, saliva ceased to flow, and its movement excitation ceased.” Pavlov concluded that the dog “cannot bear chains and that any limitation on its freedom elicits excitation of all its higher nervous activity.” The experimenters then launched a series of trials during which they successfully suppressed this reflex of freedom by starving the dog and feeding it only when it was bound on the stand—and Refleks became a most productive experimental animal.17
The reflex of freedom thus joined the reflex of purpose as a fundamental, inborn, unconditional response of animals, including humans—rooted in the subcortex like the drives for food, sex, and self-preservation. Gubergrits’s experience with Refleks demonstrated that these inborn reflexes (or, instincts) were not, however, immutable. Invoking his lab experiments, Pavlov explained in two public lectures that these precious mechanisms could be either strengthened or inhibited by life experience. “Human life consists in the pursuit of all sorts of goals: high, low, important, empty, and so forth.” Some people pass happily from purpose to purpose, and for them “life is beautiful and strong.” Striving toward even relatively unimportant goals—as did a collector—strengthened the reflex of purpose. Just as appetite eventually disappeared when an animal remained unfed, so could the reflexes of purpose and freedom be inhibited and even extinguished by life conditions—leading to lethargy, despair, and even suicide.18
For Pavlov, this revelation from the lab illuminated Russians’ disturbing passivity and lack of initiative, yet also held out some hope for their future:
When the negative features of the Russian character—laziness, lack of enterprise, indifference or even a slovenly attitude toward every vital task—provoke a melancholy mood, I say to myself “No, these are not our core characteristics, they are the wretched sediment, the damned legacy of serfdom. It made the lord a parasite and freed him, through the unpaid labor of others, from life’s natural and normal practice of striving to obtain daily bread for himself and those dear to him, of winning his place in life; and it left his reflex of purpose unexercised in vital fundamental tasks. It made the serf a completely passive creature without any goal in life, since there arose constantly in the path of his most natural aspirations an insurmountable obstacle in the form of the all-powerful will and caprice of the baron and baroness. And then I fantasize: A spoiled appetite and weakened nutrition can be corrected and restored by a careful regime and special hygiene. The same can and must occur with the reflex of purpose that has been historically downtrodden on Russian soil. If each of us will make of this reflex a cherished part of our being, if parents and teachers of all ranks will make it their main task to strengthen and develop this reflex in the masses under their stewardship, if our society and state will provide greater opportunities for the practice of this reflex, then we will make of ourselves that which we should and can be, judging from many episodes in our historical life and by various displays of our creative strength.19
Here he also expressed his belief—one he shared with Darwin and most leading biologists of his own generation—in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Any strengthening or weakening of the reflexes of purpose and freedom during one generation was passed on hereditarily to the next. Analyzing a suicide in a short story by Alexander Kuprin, he observed that this character “was the victim of the reflex of slavery inherited from his mother, a servant.” Had Kuprin’s protagonist understood his condition, he might have been able to overcome it by “adopting systematic measures” to inhibit it.20
Pavlov’s patriotic reaction to the war and concern for the development of Russian physiology led him to join physiologists Nikolai Vvedenskii, Vartan Vartanov, and Aleksei Likhachev in March 1916 to found the I. M. Sechenov Society of Russian Physiologists. Their goal was to unite specialists and address scientific issues through annual meetings, the publication of a journal, prizes for Russian contributions to experimental biology, and support for various scientific institutions. The need for a journal was especially acute because in its absence Russian physiologists had always been compelled to publish either abroad, in obscure university publications, or in medical journals (for which detailed physiological articles were usually too specialized). The impossibility of publishing in leading German journals during the war had, of course, highlighted this problem. 21
The Ministry of Internal Affairs forwarded the physiologists’ plans to various agencies for comment and discovered from Petrograd’s governor that the founders of the proposed journal were all politically suspect. Petrograd University’s professor of physiology Nikolai Vvedenskii had been found guilty of revolutionary propaganda in 1878, and in 1909 had been summoned by the police to explain his association with radicals under surveillance. Vartan Vartanov, professor of physiology at the women’s Medical Institute, had in 1911 and 1913 been involved with Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats—though it was unclear whether these relationships were “of a criminal or social character.” Pavlov and Likhachev had in 1905 been among the “organizers of an illegal union of professors.” Yet each had apparently led blameless lives in the interim, and Pavlov had since delivered a public lecture with no untoward consequences. The new society was approved in June 1916, but plans for its Congress of Russian Physiologists made their way through the wary bureaucracy very slowly. 22
In 1916, Pavlov’s colleagues in the West were deeply saddened to hear that the sixty-six year-old Nobelist had died. The deceased, it turned out, was actually another eminent Russian Pavlov. A relieved but seemingly unconvinced Francis Benedict wrote to his Russian colleague in May 1916, “You cannot tell how much disturbed we were at hearing the report of your death in three important journals, but your wife’s letter has led us to believe that these reports were wrong and that your name was confused with [professor of surgery at the Military-Medical Academy] E. W. Pawlow, who died in February.” Although he had suffered an unsettling attack of pneumonia again in April of that year, Pavlov was indeed very much alive.23
* * *
After successfully defending her doctoral thesis in 1914—and having provoked the chief into declaring his affection by threatening to abandon his lab for Kravkov’s—Maria Petrova remained at the IEM, where she was among the first coworkers to conduct experiments in the Towers of Silence. Although not yet equipped with finished soundproof rooms, the Towers became Pavlov’s central facility during the war. Petrova was the only woman working there at the time, so it was clearly on her behalf that the chief moved a large mirror from his second-floor study to the new venue, explaining solicitously that this fixture was “very necessary for ladies.” Mornings he brought her at the bench his own blue cup filled with hot strong sweet tea.24
Coworkers noticed their special relationship, of course, and some referred to it elliptically in their memoirs. A few surviving notes and letters attest to their intimacy, his deep affection, and the mundane challenges of arranging their trysts. The only extant account of their intimate relationship, however, is hers. According to her memoirs, she often recorded his words immediately after returning home from a particularly moving encounter, but she sat down to write the history of their relationship only shortly after his death. (Pavlov, she claims, approved her intention to do so.) What follows, then, is based largely on her account of the second phase of their affair.
By the fall of 1914, Pavlov had been courting Petrova for two years. Having overcome his hesitations, he now yearned to consummate their affair. She recalls that he confronted his own objections—his age, the moral problem of infidelity—and proclaimed them resolved in a romantic peroration:
When people love one another passionately, not with a wretched showy passion, but sincerely, and are joined by love for a common mission, then there are not and cannot be objections, just as there can be no obstacles for them in the satisfaction of their attraction to one another, of their natural and fully normal desire. One must only avoid as much as possible the suffering of the people close to one and by one’s egoistic happiness not bring great unhappiness to them. We should not consider it a true evil if our real love doesn’t bring suffering to others. We should not suffer from a remorseful conscience, because there is something that stands higher than anything in the world—truth and true love for our [scientific] mission and for one another.25
Shortly thereafter, according to her memoirs, Pavlov visited her at home, complimented her on her housekeeping, chatted with her visiting husband and son, and, after the Petrov males departed for some pressing engagement, the lovers consummated their affair.26
For the next twenty-two years, until Pavlov’s death, she occupied a central place in his personal and scientific life. He remained devoted to his family, but the couple fashioned a large space in their lives for each other. He began almost every day, when his family was still sleeping, with a phone call to her (as he had decades earlier with a letter to Serafima). He openly displayed his affection for her in the lab (where, by the early 1920s, the pair worked alone on the second floor of the Towers of Silence) and, somewhat less conspicuously, on the street. “He did not attempt at all to hide from others his attitude toward me. He didn’t speak about it, but neither did he hide it, and often, without concealing it from anybody except his family, he would come to me from the Institute laboratory, near which I lived. When it was raining...he would take me by the arm and protect me with his umbrella.”27 Over the years, he made her a presence in his own family. She enjoyed good relations with his son Vladimir (who referred to her with the affectionate diminutive “Kapitosha”) and, for a while, with his daughter Vera, and she became the beloved godmother to Vladimir’s daughters.
Serafima was well aware of her husband’s attachment, but she does not mention Petrova in her memoirs and destroyed most of her personal correspondence, so we have only scattered indications of her response to her husband’s infidelity over the years. She seems to have alternated between fury and acceptance, and between frank recognition of the nature of their relationship and denial of its sexual nature. She continued to be the respected matriarch of the Pavlov family, and, as her husband assured her in April 1916 in a passage that may have referred obliquely to Petrova, “aside from our children, who are equally dear to both of us, nobody ever was or will be dearer to me than you.” “Although I don’t know how to express my feelings,” he added, “and although as a consequence of our intimacy you have borne many of my beastly outbursts, we are strongly connected one to the other.” The silences in her memoirs attest, however, to emotional distance: Her recollections about the years 1914 to 1936 contain few, if any, of the accounts of her husband’s inner life and emotional responses that so enrich her story of their first twenty-five years together.28
For Petrova, Pavlov was the love of her life. “I was entirely under the power of this man and dreamed all the time about the sacrifices that I might make for the happiness he had given me. He was worth any sacrifices. This was in all regards a complete man, the best model of the human species.... I never experienced with my young husband such a complete, thrilling feeling as I did with Ivan Petrovich.” Were it not for multiple abortions, she writes, they would have had “many” children. “Ivan Petrovich said that he was very happy with our sexual intimacy; he was tortured by only one thing—that he was an old man in comparison with me, old enough to be my father, and therefore he feared that he would spoil me with his intimacy, his old man’s love.” But, he told her, “our intimacy is indispensable to me. For me, love exists only when it is connected with more general interests—with children or with passionate love and dedication to a common mission. In you I have found everything.’”29
Yet he also expressed his uneasiness about advancing age and his relationship with a younger woman by frequently comparing himself to a decrepit, fearsome figure in Russian folklore, Koshchei the Deathless. Pavlov’s youthful energy and enthusiasm for life were noted by all who observed him in his sixties (and, for that matter, in his eighties). Koshchei the Deathless, too, was essentially immortal (he could be destroyed only by surmounting a daunting series of obstacles). Yet his countenance was awful and menacing, his name was commonly invoked to describe a physically exhausted and emaciated man (a combination of “death warmed over” and “skin and bones” in English parlance), and he was notorious as the kidnapper and enslaver of young women. One commentator on this legendary figure concludes that “the mythological point to the tales seems to be the need to come to terms in a harmonious way with the natural world”—and so with the inevitability of aging and death. Pavlov remained fascinated by Koshchei throughout the last decades of his life.30
On the frosty Christmas morning of 1916, Pavlov set off as usual to meet Petrova on his way to the IEM. She was dividing her days between the lab there and a small military clinic, from which she made her way to Bol’shaia Pushkarskaia Street to meet him en route. When they reached the corner of Kamennoostrovskii and Lopukhinskaia streets, one long block from the Institute, she left him to return to the clinic. He had walked about twenty steps along Lopukhinskaia when he slipped and fell. Coworker Gleb Anrep was approaching the lab when he spotted an old man crumbling against an iron fence and clearly about to fall. Hastening to him, Anrep discovered to his horror that it was Pavlov, “deathly pale and weak.” Flagging down a passing car, Anrep transported him to the lab, where he was diagnosed with an impacted fracture of the neck of the femur—in common parlance, a hip fracture. Prince Ol’denburgskii was notified and dispatched his car to take Pavlov home.31
Serafima was there awaiting her husband’s return as she prepared a holiday breakfast for their friends. The first three guests had just arrived when the buzzer rang and the building’s doorman ran into the apartment, grabbed a chair, and raced out and down the stairs. Frozen in the hallway, she saw several men bearing her husband upstairs in the chair. They informed her that he had broken his leg, and that Prince Ol’denburgskii’s chauffeur had brought him home and was now on his way to fetch a surgeon. Pavlov was smiling bravely, assuring his wife that his accident was “a trifle” and that he would be back on his feet within a week.
A fractured hip, however, was no small matter for a sixty-seven-year-old man. Bedridden for the better part of three months as it healed, he walked in pain for some time afterward. He confessed fifteen years later that the experience had shaken him badly and created a CR: the sharp pain and long convalescence “became so imprinted in my brain that even today I cannot walk down the street without looking under my feet and noticing every irregularity.”32
While recovering, he had Orbeli lecture in his stead at the Academy, absented himself from faculty meetings, and monitored his labs as best he could from the sickbed. He remarked gamely to Anrep that he would “trick my bad luck and...turn it to a real profit; at last I shall have time to write my book.” Refusing a nurse, he was tended instead by Serafima and Viktor. He amused himself in the mornings by teaching the five-year-old son of the Pavlovs’ cook to read. After his physician’s visit in the afternoons, he struggled with his monograph on CRs. In deference to his situation, Serafima overcame her distaste for the subject and took dictation.33
Before settling into this routine, he insisted on contacting Petrova. Confined to bed, he had no private access to the phone in his apartment. Three days after his accident, he somehow got word to her, asking her to call and inform Serafima of the results of experiments she had conducted in his absence. One imagines Serafima talking to Maria over the phone, with Ivan’s sickbed in hailing distance. The resulting conversation, Petrova surmised, “was probably unpleasant for his wife, since she spoke with me by telephone in such a tone that I lost all desire to continue our conversation and told her that I wouldn’t give her any information about my work, but that when I. P. recovered I would tell him everything myself.” But Ivan insisted, and so Maria reported very briefly to Serafima about her research. In Maria’s account, Serafima did manage to convey a message of her own: “The conversation was conducted to the very end in the most unfriendly manner, and I firmly resolved, despite my enormous desire to see I. P., that I wouldn’t visit him. I cannot, of course, blame her for her irritated tone; in her place, I would have absolutely refused to speak with me.”34